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A Chinese spacecraft lifted off the moon Thursday night with a load of moon rocks, the first step in its return to Earth, the government space agency reported. Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to leave, is the last in a series of ambitious missions for the Beijing space program, which also has an orbiter and a rover bound for Mars.
Just before the ascension vehicle took off, the lander deployed what the space administration called the first autonomous Chinese flag on the moon. The agency released an image – apparently taken from the undercarriage – of the climb vehicle firing with its engines on take off.
CNSA
The spacecraft “unfurled the red five-star national flag, an actual flag made from fabric, marking a first in the country’s aerospace history,” state media said.
The Chang’e 5 landed on the Sea of Storms on the near side of the moon on Tuesday. Its mission: to collect around 4 pounds of moon rocks and bring them back to Earth, the first return of samples since the Soviet spacecraft did in the 1970s. Previously, American astronauts from Apollo have reported hundreds of books of moon rocks.
The landing site is near a formation called Mons Rumker and may contain rocks billions of years younger than those recovered earlier.
/ AP
The ascension vehicle took off from the moon shortly after 11 p.m. Beijing time Thursday (3 p.m. GMT) and was to travel with a vehicle back to lunar orbit, then transfer the samples to a capsule, according to the China National Space Administration. . Moon rocks and debris were sealed inside a special cartridge to prevent contamination.
It was not clear when the affair would occur. After the transfer, the ascension module would be ejected and the capsule would remain in lunar orbit for about a week, waiting for the optimal time to make the return trip to Earth.
Chinese officials said the capsule containing the samples was due to land on Earth around the middle of the month. Touchdown is scheduled for the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where Chinese astronauts have returned to the Shenzhou spacecraft.
Chang’e 5’s lander, which remained on the moon, was able to take samples from the surface and drill 2 meters (about 6 feet).
While collecting samples was its primary task, the lander was also equipped to take deep photographs of the area, map conditions below the surface with ground-penetrating radar, and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content. .
Chang’e 5 has reignited talks about sending astronauts to the moon by China and possibly building a science base, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects.
China launched its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly serviced by a reusable space plane.
As China steps up cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely constrained by US concerns about the secretive nature and close military ties of the Chinese program. NASA Scientific Director Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted a congratulatory message to China on Tuesday after the spacecraft landed on the moon.
China is implementing a phased approach to its lunar program, launching a series of increasingly complex robotic spacecraft to develop and test the propulsion, guidance, navigation and landing systems needed for exploration at long term.
The Chang’e 1 and 2 missions successfully reached lunar orbit in 2007 and 2010 respectively, followed by the Chang’e 3 lunar lander in 2013 and Chang’e 4, which landed on the other side of the moon in 2019. Chang’e 5 is the first of two planned return missions and China’s most ambitious lunar mission to date.
Bill Harwood contributed to this report.
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